Maine Home + Design
April 2014
Artist Issue

“JT Gibson understands the physical, visual, technical, and visceral issues of sculpture far better than most people I know. Each piece has it’s own distinct and well-articulated identity, and it stays with you.”
– Ken Greenleaf, artist and art critic

 

The Portland Phoenix
July 2014
Corey Daniels Gallery Review

“Minimal and elegant, JT Gibson’s installations and sculptures evoke patience, rhythm, and sensibilities that feel decidedly non-Western. He works in bronze, steel, wood, and aluminum; his pieces mounted on the walls and freestanding in vibrant, rustically shaded paint. In a series titled “Rack,” many appear as if devolved from function and form. Their figurations make no nods toward anthropocentric utility, and instead are fully subsumed in the ballast, power, and curvature of their own identities. The many iterations of “Rack”—saying that title alone should tease out some of the works’ latent masculinities—seem to exercise similar rhythmic schema despite their figurative variations. Many are tall, slender beams forged into elegant depressions and planes. Beyond, Gibson meditates in other poses: with a diptych of two near-identical, cherry-red concavities blur the monstrous and serene, or a triad of glossy, metallic surfaces refracting the light of the room. They demand little and seem to resist the notion of accolade; still, they’re fantastic.”
– Nick Schroeder, art critic

 

Portland Press Herald
May 2011
University of Maine Museum of Art Review

“My favorite part of the show, however, is J.T. Gibson’s five tactile sculptures. These works hover exquisitely on the edge of organic tool grip logic. Gibson’s gorgeous “End Game,” for example, is a monolithic handgrip of laminated poplar, pine tar and red pigment. Human-sized, it stands equal to us. Yet when the artist takes the same form (but hand-sized) and multiplies it 60 times in wax on five shallow shelves, it’s like looking at all the handles in a master craftsman’s workshop. Gibson’s “Operation Milkweed” is a pair of large, steel, wall-mounted and pointed pod forms. They were already sculpturally terrific, but Gibson surprisingly added custom cast bronze handles. Yet his gambit pays off as the pieces relate to the human body as a pair while announcing their literal weight and volume. Another beautiful sculpture is “Drift,” a tall, sky-pointed thorn or claw of perfectly finished and oiled black walnut. Peen, fang, tool or whatever: it rocks.”
– Daniel Kany, art critic